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Against Photography: Susan Sontag's

Vietnam
a
Franny Nudelman
a
Franny Nudelman is an Associate Professor in the English
Department and the Institute for the Comparative Study of
Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University. She is
the author of John Brown's Body: Slavery, Violence, and the
Culture of War (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), and
is currently writing a book about activist documentary of the
Vietnam era. Her essay on Mary McCarthy's Vietnam journalism
was recently published in American Literature.
Published online: 27 Apr 2015.
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To cite this article: Franny Nudelman (2014) Against Photography: Susan Sontag's Vietnam,
Photography and Culture, 7:1, 7-20

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 Photography &
Culture
Against Photography:
Volume 7—Issue 1 Susan Sontag’s
March 2014
pp. 7–20 Vietnam
DOI:
10.2752/175145214X61001139322246

Reprints available directly from

Franny Nudelman
the publishers

Photocopying permitted by
licence only Abstract
This essay argues that Susan Sontag’s 1968 trip to Hanoi paved
© Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
the way for her groundbreaking reflections on photography.
2014
More broadly, it describes political travel as an experimental
Downloaded by [Franny Nudelman] at 09:11 04 July 2015

practice that helped Sontag to develop her ideas about aesthetics,

ethics, and activism. If, as Sontag repeatedly claimed, the trip to
Hanoi marked a “turning point” in her writing and her life, the
particulars of that experience bear close scrutiny. Sontag traveled
to Hanoi in 1968 to demonstrate her opposition to the U.S. war
in Vietnam. In her book, Trip to Hanoi, she describes the trip as an
inward journey and a means to self-transformation; recording and
critiquing her narrow-minded response to North Vietnam, Sontag
tries to radicalize her perspective. Sontag’s trip prepared her to
mount On Photography’s critique of photographic immediacy. In
this book, the pernicious mental habits that Sontag casts off in
Hanoi resurface as generalized traits of photographic perception.
Sontag’s essays on photography contain no trace, however,
of the utopian potential for self-transformation that Sontag
cultivated while in Hanoi. On Photography’s rapacious tourist, who
mistakes gratifying images for reality, appears the alter ego of
the activist—Sontag herself—who travels to the scene of war.

Keywords: Susan Sontag, activism, Vietnam, photography,

travel

In a public exchange with novelist Kenzaburo O ˉ e, published in 2000,

Susan Sontag explained the importance of travel to her work as a
ˉ e and Sontag 2000: 16). She wrote, “Something
“literary activist” (O
I long ago promised myself was that I would never take positions
on what I had not known, seen, with my own eyes. I could speak
about the war in Vietnam because I had gone to Vietnam, in 1968
and 1973.” Emphasizing the singular power of firsthand observation,
she continued, “Good will and thoughtfulness can never substitute
for the concreteness of direct experience—the shock of the real”
(O ˉ e and Sontag 2000: 16). Throughout her career as a cultural
critic and occasional activist, Sontag struggled to figure out how

Photography & Culture  Volume 7  Issue 1  March 2014, pp. 7–20

 8  Against Photography: Susan Sontag’s Vietnam Franny Nudelman
to produce what she called an “appropriate
response” to suffering that takes place at a
distance (1966a: 4). Her voyages to controversial
or embattled destinations—Cuba, Vietnam,
China, Bosnia, Poland—were instrumental
to her evolving ideas about the relationship
between aesthetics, ethics, and activism. If
Sontag’s writing about photography stresses the
moral danger of an unthinking responsiveness
to foreign suffering, the practice of political
travel both shaped her critique of photographic
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immediacy and offered an alternative
means of responding to the crisis of war.
In this essay I argue that Sontag’s trip to
Hanoi, and the book she wrote about it, paved
the way for her groundbreaking reflections
on photography. Sontag protested against the
U.S. war in Vietnam by signing public letters,
speaking at teach-ins and town halls, and
participating in antiwar demonstrations. Her
activism culminated in the spring of 1968 with
her trip to Hanoi.1 If the trip was a form of
political expression that demonstrated solidarity
with the North Vietnamese, it also gave Sontag
a chance to explore the radical potential of
self-reflection; like other activists who traveled
to Hanoi, she described the trip as an inward
journey. As she explains at the outset of Trip
to Hanoi, “Unless I could effect in myself some
change of awareness, of consciousness, it would
scarcely matter that I’d actually been to Vietnam”
(Sontag 1968: 8). In keeping with the antiwar
movement’s interest in altered perception
as a means to social change, Trip to Hanoi
records the process of introspection, and extols
political travel as a source of new awareness.
Once the war was over, Sontag’s hopes for
radical change dimmed; she doubted that protest
of any kind could challenge the momentum
of ongoing military expansion. On Photography
expresses this pessimism by totalizing the
attitudes that Trip to Hanoi works to dismantle.
These essays describe the objectification of
foreign cultures as a constitutive feature of
Photography & Culture  Volume 7  Issue 1  March 2014, pp. 7–20
photographic vision: shooting and viewing
photographs, Americans learn to see the world
as theirs for the taking. In On Photography, the
pernicious mental habits that Sontag casts
off in Hanoi resurface as generalized traits of
photographic perception, and the rapacious
tourist, who travels in order to accumulate
photographs, supplants the writer-activist
who travels in an effort to stop the war.2
Recently, scholars have observed On
Photography’s censorious attitude toward
photographs. Rather than exploring this peculiar
intensity, however, they use Sontag’s negativity
as a foil against which to argue for the power
of photographs to prompt meaningful action.3
Conceptualizing action in hypothetical terms, as
the desired outcome of right seeing, such analyses
fail to observe that Sontag took political action
before writing her jeremiad against photography:
she did not need photographs to rouse her.
Indeed, the relentless negativity of On Photography
is the residue of the very kind of ethical
responsiveness that scholars tend to idealize.
Sontag’s political concerns are nowhere
more apparent than in her commentary on
photography, which takes up the subject of
suffering in the context of war, genocide,
and torture. Deeply interested in the ethical
properties of photographs, Sontag was also
a lifelong activist who used travel as a means
of acquiring firsthand experience that, in
her view, photographs could not impart.4
Viewed in this light, On Photography’s critique
represents the afterlife of Sontag’s opposition
to the war in Vietnam, inviting us to take
full measure of the utopianism that these
influential essays so vehemently reject.
Here—Not There
Speaking at the dedication of the Los Angeles
Peace Tower in March 1966, Sontag urged her
audience to acknowledge their distance from the
Vietnamese, and the consequent impossibility
of feeling their pain. She told them, “At this
 Franny Nudelman Against Photography: Susan Sontag’s Vietnam  9
moment, as we stand here, babies are being
charred by napalm bombs, young men—
Vietnamese and American—are falling like
trees to lie forever with their faces in the mud,
and we who are here—not there—alive, not
poisoned or burned, are being injured morally
in a way that is very profound” (Sontag 1966b:
4). In an effort to take “moral injury” seriously,
Sontag insists that to be “here” is also to be
“not there,” and that to be “alive” is to be “not
poisoned or burned.” Far from encouraging
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identification with the suffering of the Vietnamese,
Sontag implores her audience to become more
aware of the ways in which they do not suffer,
and suggests that the divide between here and
there, self and other should not be bridged.
Advocating a heightened sense of distance
and incomprehension, Sontag refashions
experimental techniques of defamiliarization to
serve the ends of war resistance. During the early
1960s, Sontag was immersed in an avant-garde
that valorized intense aesthetic encounters as
a means of resisting the frenetic consumption
of mass-produced goods. For example, in her
landmark essay “Against Interpretation,” written
in 1964, Sontag implores readers to abandon
interpretation—a symptom of consumerist
excess—in favor of a direct experience of the
“luminousness of the thing in itself ” (1966a:
13). Working in the diverse media of painting,
sculpture, performance, and poetry, artists
staged intensely physical encounters with the
material world while rejecting the conventions
that might order the sensations that such
encounters produced. In the form of assemblage,
environments, and happenings, visual artists, in
particular, unsettled the routines of aesthetic
consumption in order to renew the viewer’s
capacity to experience the world around her.
The method of collage was central to these
aesthetic experiments. Collage connects disparate
fragments on a common surface and, by letting
the seams between them remain visible, turns
the awkward or unsightly joint into an object of
Photography & Culture  Volume 7  Issue 1  March 2014, pp. 7–20
contemplation (Taylor 2004: 8). Drawing attention
to the act of connecting what is unlike and does
not belong together, collage denaturalizes objects
and makes them more difficult to consume.
Sontag used the term “radical juxtaposition” to
describe the “collage principle” as it applied to
happenings, the avant-garde theater events that
flourished in New York in the late 1950s and
early 1960s (1966a: 269–70). In the tradition
of surrealism, happenings featured “deliberately
occasional materials … paper, wooden crates,
tin cans, burlap sacks, foods” (Sontag 1966:
267). Stripping these familiar objects—what
Sontag calls the “junk of urban civilization”—
of their routine uses, happenings destroyed
“conventional meanings” in order to create “new
meanings or counter-meanings” (1966: 269).
The Peace Tower itself was an experimental
object, cobbled together in a provisional fashion,
and bound to be discarded.5 Designed by
sculptor Mark di Suvero, it stood over 58 feet
high, and was surrounded by 418 works of art,
each 2 feet square and devoted to antiwar
messages. The tower functioned as a collage,
with its disparate elements loosely united by
their common theme and size. The Peace
Tower was inspired, in part, by Sabatino Rodia’s
Watts Towers. These three towers, assembled
over the course of thirty-three years, were built
from the occasional materials of urban waste—
broken tiles and bottles, scrap metal, shells—and
mounted on a frame of iron and concrete. Once
he finished building the towers, Rodia, an Italian
immigrant who worked as a tile setter and
butcher, turned the property over to a neighbor
and never came back. As Francis Frascina
observes, Rodia’s towers were embraced by Los
Angeles artists as an example of the “culturally
resistant elements of assemblage” (1999: 45).6
At the dedication of the Peace Tower
Sontag juxtaposes “here” and “there,” joining
Vietnam and America, and holding them apart,
in the manner of collage. Her rhetoric is in
keeping not only with avant-garde experiments
 10  Against Photography: Susan Sontag’s Vietnam Franny Nudelman
in defamiliarization, but also with efforts to
bring such experimentation to the realm of
antiwar protest. As she became involved in the
movement to end the war in Vietnam, Sontag
came to see consumerism not only as a threat
to the senses but also as the root cause of U.S.
expansionism (1969: 193–204). Consequently, she
began to reflect on how modes of consuming
goods, including art, taught Americans to
consume foreign cultures. In this context, the
desire for new sensations that she extols in
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“Against Interpretation” no longer provided an
antidote to mass consumption; indeed, Sontag
became increasingly wary of the pleasures of
immediacy unmediated by critical reflection.7
At the Peace Tower, Sontag advocates
irremediable distance as the basis for a kind
of defamiliarization that leads not to aesthetic
pleasure but rather to heightened ethical
awareness. She refuses to collapse the distance
between here and there in an effort to make
the suffering of war less accessible. Traveling to
Hanoi two years later, Sontag tried to cultivate
this sense of “not thereness” at the site of
direct experience. In Hanoi she conceptualized
travel against the grain, emphasizing not her
proximity to the reality of North Vietnam, but
rather the disorientation of witnessing firsthand
what seems real only from a distance.
Trip to Hanoi begins by problematizing
documentary representations of the U.S. war in
Vietnam. Sontag tells her readers that before
traveling to Hanoi in the spring of 1968 she
immersed herself in journalistic accounts of
the war: she watched newsreel footage, and
read newspaper coverage in the American and
French press, as well as books by journalists who
had traveled to Vietnam. Using the materials of
mainstream journalism, she constructed a keen
and motivating “mental image” of Vietnam and
its people—what she describes as “a Vietnam
inside my head, under my skin, in the pit of my
stomach” (Sontag 1968: 8, 11). This mental image
depended especially on a “large portfolio” of
Photography & Culture  Volume 7  Issue 1  March 2014, pp. 7–20
photographs: “napalmed corpses, live citizens
on bicycles, the hamlets of thatched huts … the
cylindrical, one-person bomb shelters spaced
along the sidewalks of Hanoi, the thick yellow
straw hats worn by schoolchildren as protection
against fragmentation bombs” (Sontag 1968: 7).
When she arrives in Hanoi, Sontag has the
opportunity to test her imagined experience of
Vietnam, drawn largely from these documentary
sources, against the actual place. She is dismayed
to discover that the “real” North Vietnam is less
interesting and less compelling than the one
that she had created in her mind. Reversing the
expectation that firsthand experience will have
special emotional power, Sontag recognizes
that she feels a motivating sense of solidarity
with the North Vietnamese only from afar;
this realization constitutes a personal crisis
that becomes the subject of her narrative.
Like other Americans who wrote about
the trip to Hanoi, Sontag forgoes detailed
description of North Vietnam in favor of a
meticulous rendering of her attitudes, and how
they change over the course of her stay. Trip to
Hanoi describes the boredom and detachment
that Sontag feels in Hanoi as emblematic of the
American consumer’s addiction to novelty, and
recounts her effort to shed these mental habits
as she learns to appreciate North Vietnam.
Early in the book, Sontag offers up her journal
writing from the first five days of her stay. From
the first, she is full of complaints. She does
not like being led around like a child, and is
frustrated that she cannot communicate more
openly with her hosts. In this section of the
book, Sontag indulges in grand generalizations
about the differences between Vietnamese and
American culture. The Vietnamese, “unreservedly
moralistic,” are characterized by their ethical
sensibility; Americans, by contrast, embody
“aesthetic consciousness” (Sontag 1968: 18–19).
Sontag repeatedly describes Vietnamese speech
as repetitive and dull, and is irritated by “their
flattening out of language” (1968: 16). She
 Franny Nudelman Against Photography: Susan Sontag’s Vietnam  11
reproduces these (supposedly) unedited early
impressions as evidence of the extent to which
her own perceptions have been shaped by the
excesses of capitalism. “Despite my admiration
for the Vietnamese and my shame over the
deeds of my country,” she writes, “I still feel
like someone from a ‘big’ culture visiting a
‘little’ culture. My consciousness, reared in that
‘big’ culture, is a creature with many organs,
accustomed to being fed by a stream of cultural
goods, and infected by irony” (Sontag 1968: 26).
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Scholars have argued that Sontag’s failure to
understand and to appreciate North Vietnam
is consistent with her critical method. As Liam
Kennedy puts it, Sontag’s criticism is devoted
to “keeping a sense of otherness alive” (1990:
38). Her “dialectical thinking”—open-ended,
inconsistent, unsystematic—“demands that
alterity is not interiorized” (1990: 38). Cary
Nelson observes that in Trip to Hanoi Sontag
treats her analytical objects as “unassimilable or
frustrating,” which enables her to reflect on the
limits of her own understanding (1980: 722).
Although Trip to Hanoi is “directed neither toward
a written text nor toward any formal aesthetic
object,” Nelson writes, it “displays both Sontag’s
characteristic virtues and the stages through
which her other essays typically proceed” (1980:
713). In this view, Sontag’s portrayal of North
Vietnam provides another example—if of an
anomalous type—of how she approaches the
problem of interpretation more generally.
Instead, I argue that Sontag’s trip to Hanoi
helped to define her critical method. Sontag’s
lifelong concern with how we consume pain
that we do not experience takes root during
the war in Vietnam. Her signature style was, in
part, an effort to shore up an ethical distinction
between “here” and “there” at the level of form.
In her cultural criticism, Sontag often juxtaposes
irreconcilable observations and contentions,
letting deliberation unfold in the space between
opposing statements. This critical style, with
its tendency to contradict, negate, and revisit,
Photography & Culture  Volume 7  Issue 1  March 2014, pp. 7–20
adopts the motion of travel—shuttling between
places—and signifies Sontag’s commitment to
deracination as a guiding principle of intellectual
and political endeavor. Favoring critical self-
reflection over documentary observation, Trip
to Hanoi forgoes the gratifying immediacy of
reportage; in doing so, it suggests the war in
Vietnam as one point of origin for the oppositions
that animate Sontag’s approach to cultural
analysis, and political travel as a way of producing
the disorientation this critical practice requires.
Turning Point
Writing about Trip to Hanoi in 1972, Leo Marx
notes that the book is structured by “two sharp
turns of feeling” that Sontag uses to “separate
the book into three parts” (1972: 561). Engaging
in what she calls an “active confrontation with
the limits of my own thinking,” Sontag records
and reflects on her responses to North
Vietnam (1968: 86). Each section of the book
considers and recasts the part that goes before
it, and in this way dramatizes Sontag’s changing
attitudes. The “sharp turns” that organize Trip
to Hanoi function as “radical juxtapositions,”
applied not to urban detritus but to the stuff of
consciousness—the mental habits and cultural
assumptions thrown into relief by the dislocations
of political travel. Sontag’s autobiographical
narrative proceeds by way of revelations that
are at once sudden and assiduously cultivated.
Sontag was one of nearly 200 Americans
who defied government restrictions on travel
to North Vietnam.8 As Judy Wu observes,
the trip to Hanoi was “a long and dangerous
undertaking” (2013: 1). Activists who took the
trip exposed themselves to physical danger,
legal retribution, and emotional harassment.
Because many of these activists believed, as
Sontag did, that U.S. militarism was reproduced
at the level of perception, they avoided assuming
authoritative knowledge about conditions in
North Vietnam on the basis of their brief, carefully
choreographed visits. Instead, they saw travel
 12  Against Photography: Susan Sontag’s Vietnam Franny Nudelman
as a means of identifying, and reflecting on, the
ways that Americans were taught to appropriate
foreign countries. To this end, antiwar travelers
authored a body of writing about the trip to
Hanoi that is characterized not by documentary
observation but by introspection. In Night Flight
to Hanoi, Daniel Berrigan posed the problem
succinctly: “What sort of proximity to actual
war is required, if men are to become thoughtful
and critical about their actions?” (1968: 94). In
essays, articles, books, and poems, travelers focus
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not on the sights and sounds of wartime Hanoi,
but on the complexities of their experience as
they try, and often fail, to comprehend North
Vietnamese culture. In the face of such difficulties,
activists reflect on their identity as Americans.
As Grace Paley recounts, “If my understanding
of Vietnam was imperfect, my understanding of
my own country was growing daily” (1998: 56).
In place of objective description, these
narratives paint a hallucinatory portrait of
a society animated by its remarkable facility
for reconstruction; the North Vietnamese
prosper in the face of the enemy’s enormous
technological advantage because they waste
nothing. If an outsized aggression against a small
country reflects the American habit of excessive
consumption and extravagant waste, the power of
the North Vietnamese to survive bombardment
depends—in the eyes of American visitors—
on their ability to turn the detritus of war to
new purposes. Visitors reliably marvel over the
Vietnamese facility for reuse and compare it
with the waste produced by the U.S. military.
Sontag praises the North Vietnamese for their
commitment to the “principle of total use,” which
stands in stark contrast to the United States, a
society “based on maximal waste” (1968: 66).
She writes, “The big wasteful society dumps
its garbage, its partly unemployable proletarian
conscripts, its poisons, and its bombs upon a
small, virtually defenseless, frugal society whose
citizens, those fortunate enough to survive,
then go about picking up the debris, out of
Photography & Culture  Volume 7  Issue 1  March 2014, pp. 7–20
which they fashion materials for daily use and
self-defense” (Sontag 1968: 67). To illustrate
this contrast, Sontag describes how the North
Vietnamese reuse downed American planes:
Each plane that’s shot down is methodically
taken apart. The tires are cut up to make
the rubber sandals that most people wear.
Any component of the engine that’s still
intact is modified to be reused as part of
a truck motor. The body of the plane is
dismantled, and the metal is melted down
to be made into tools, small machine
parts, surgical instruments, wire, spokes
for bicycle wheels, combs, ashtrays, and
of course the famous numbered rings
given as presents to visitors. Every last
nut, bolt, and screw from the plane is
used. The same holds for anything else
the Americans drop. (1968: 65–66)
In these examples, the North Vietnamese
dismantle U.S. weaponry—taking apart,
cutting up, melting down—in a process of
modification that turns weapons into useful
objects. Struggling to find a way to experience
Hanoi that does not perpetuate the voracity
of the American consumer, Sontag imagines an
alternative relation to objects and, by extension,
experience, embodied by the North Vietnamese.
The North Vietnamese reused found
materials out of necessity. American visitors
were fascinated by this practice not only
because it neatly expressed the strength of
North Vietnamese resistance, but also because
it appealed to their own interest in creating
alternatives to mass consumption. Sontag’s
description of the North Vietnamese talent
for repurposing spent materials—a convention
in writing about the trip to Hanoi—recalls
the techniques of avant-gardists who used
found objects to regenerate perception.
In Trip to Hanoi, the object that must be
deconstructed and rebuilt is the traveler’s
own consciousness. Adopting the North
 Franny Nudelman Against Photography: Susan Sontag’s Vietnam  13
Vietnamese craft of reuse as a model for
consciousness-raising, Sontag documents the
impact of a difficult encounter with a foreign
country on her perceptions and beliefs.
Sontag begins her book by putting her self-
absorption and penchant for ethnic stereotyping
on display in private writing ostensibly not
intended for public consumption. She then stops
to reflect on these journal entries. Expressing
revulsion that her reader has probably already
felt, she is appalled by evidence of her own
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“callowness,” and ashamed of her inability to
“subdue the backlash of my ignorance” (Sontag
1968: 40). Sontag reuses private writing that
she herself finds embarrassing in an effort to
reshape her attitudes. After the first five days
of her stay (the days we have just read about)
Sontag manages to relax, and the “psychic
cramp” that kept her from seeing North Vietnam
as a “real place” and the Vietnamese as “real
people” begins to “ease” (1968: 41). At this
point, she can take pleasure in her surroundings,
and discovers that the “standard words and
phrases” of Vietnamese expression are “richer
than I’d thought” (Sontag 1968: 40). Reusing
her own occasional writing, Sontag sets up a
contrast between her early and her subsequent
impressions and, in doing so, dramatizes the
process of self-transformation as an act of
reconstruction. Through self-examination, Sontag
comes to appreciate and enjoy North Vietnam.
In the first third of the book, Sontag uses
her journal writing to stage a critical encounter
with her own assumptions and responses.
The second third of the book is dominated
by unreserved praise as she celebrates the
virtue and equanimity of the North Vietnamese
people. Yet Sontag interrupts her paean to
North Vietnam to ask herself this question: if
her initial impatience with her hosts expressed
her complicity in consumerist culture, does
her subsequent enthusiasm again exploit the
North Vietnamese in an effort to imagine an
alternative to consumerism? She writes,
Photography & Culture  Volume 7  Issue 1  March 2014, pp. 7–20
The moment one begins to be affected by
the moral beauty of the Vietnamese … a
derisive inner voice starts calling it phony
sentimentality. Understandably, one fears
succumbing to that cut-rate sympathy for
places like Vietnam which, lacking any real
historical or psychological understanding,
becomes another instance of the ideology
of primitivism. The revolutionary politics
of many people in capitalist countries is
only a new guise for the old conservative
culture-criticism: posing against overcomplex,
hypocritical, devitalized, urban society choking
on affluence the idea of a simple people
living the simple life in a decentralized,
uncoercive, passionate society with modest
material means. (Sontag 1968: 72)
As Michael Renov observes in his discussion
of antiwar documentaries, the tendency of
American activists to romanticize anti-colonial
movements abroad “resulted in the construction
of a Vietnam of radical imagination” (1990: 261).
He describes these idealized portraits as naive
projections, evidence of the “Left’s collective
daydream” (Renov 1990: 268). Sontag levels the
same charge in this passage, accusing herself of
romanticizing the North Vietnamese. At the
same time, however, she wonders if this urge
to self-blame exhibits the very taste for nuance
that she has criticized herself for earlier. If Sontag
views her growing affection for North Vietnam
with suspicion, she also wonders why she is
not able to simply trust these new feelings?
Up until this point, critical self-consciousness
has played a contradictory double role in the
text. It is the means by which Sontag attempts
to examine and transform her point of view
as well as evidence of the very privileges that
make it difficult, if not impossible, to effect such
change. In the drama of consciousness that
governs the narrative, this moment represents a
pivotal crisis. Will Sontag listen to the “derisive
inner voice” and disavow her new appreciation
 14  Against Photography: Susan Sontag’s Vietnam Franny Nudelman
for the North Vietnamese? Or will she disavow
the impulse to self-examination? She continues,
If some of what I’ve written evokes the very
cliché of the Western left-wing intellectual
idealizing an agrarian revolution that I was so
set on not being, I must reply that a cliché is
a cliché, truth is truth, and direct experience
is—well—something one repudiates at one’s
peril. In the end I can only avow that, armed
with these very self-suspicions, I found,
through direct experience, North Vietnam
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to be a place which, in many respects,
deserves to be idealized. (Sontag 1968: 72)
This is an extraordinary moment in which
Sontag abandons the very love of refinement
for which she is famous and embraces her own
experience, however predictable, as unassailable.
Deciding to embrace the cliché—both that the
North Vietnamese are wonderful and that direct
experience is incontestable—rather than engage
in the more pleasurable critique of the cliché,
Sontag demonstrates that she has changed.9
As scholars interested in politics and culture,
we often contend with our own derisive inner
voices—voices that urge us to find fault lest we
appear earnest or even gullible in the face of
a political past that is rife with errors and false
starts. Contemporary readers will find it tempting
to accuse Sontag, as Renov might, of misusing
(appropriating, romanticizing, exploiting) North
Vietnam. This judgment, however, preempts an
adequately historicized understanding of what
motivated activists to adopt tactics that appear
imperfect to us.10 Antiwar travelers, who combine
exhaustive self-reflection with an idealized portrait
of North Vietnam, are vulnerable to charges of
exploitation and narcissism. Such accusations,
however, obscure the agency of the Vietnamese
who help to produce these idealizations, and
interpret introspection through a presentist lens
by conflating it with solipsism. The subjective
turn in narratives about the trip to Hanoi was
motivated by a critique of consumption. Sontag
Photography & Culture  Volume 7  Issue 1  March 2014, pp. 7–20
tried to resist a militarism that she associated not
with self-absorption but with a naive outward
gaze that mistakes appearance for reality and thus
too easily assimilates the world outside the self.
Sontag would readily agree with Renov that
antiwar activists constructed Vietnam to suit their
purposes. In her view, however, representations
of Vietnam were not meant to be truthful—
they were meant to be useful. As she explains,
“Vietnam offered the key to a systematic criticism
of America. In this scheme of use, Vietnam
becomes an ideal Other” (Sontag 1968: 87). By
romanticizing the North Vietnamese, activists
maintained the distance between Vietnam and
America, focusing attention on the complicity
of antiwar Americans in the militarism that they
condemned. In Trip to Hanoi, Sontag narrates
the process of introspection that turns Vietnam
into an “ideal Other,” documenting the progress
of her own “radical imagination” as, through a
complex process of trial and error, it constructs
a politically viable description of North Vietnam.
On Photography
In February of 1973, Sontag traveled to
Hanoi for the second time. During this visit,
she drafted her preface to the Vietnamese
edition of Trip to Hanoi, in which she extols
her first trip to Hanoi five years earlier as
“a turning point” in her life. She writes,
The book marks an important step in my
own work as a writer. Indeed, everything that
I have written now seems to group itself as
before or after Trip to Hanoi. That first visit
to Vietnam was, in fact, a turning point in
my life. I had a presentiment that this would
be so while I was here, and that feeling (or
rather, hope) is expressed in the book. As
it turned out, the trip was even more of a
turning point than I expected. A process
of ideological and spiritual change was set
in motion which has not yet stopped—as
I hope it never will. (Sontag 1973)11
 Franny Nudelman Against Photography: Susan Sontag’s Vietnam  15
If this preface affirms the positive effect of
political travel, the urge to negate found
expression in Sontag’s writing on photography,
which explores many of the same issues and
was begun at the same time. In Trip to Hanoi,
Sontag uses the disorienting effects of travel to
throw her perceptual habits into sharp relief;
in On Photography she renders these habits
generic, and they form the basis for her analysis
of the expansionist function of photography.
The six essays that make up the volume
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were published in The New York Review of Books
between October 1973 and June 1977. In the
first essay, “In Plato’s Cave,” Sontag makes
her case against photography in the strongest
terms. She describes a world polluted by a
superabundance of photographs; easy to take,
carry, and keep, photographs proliferate, crowding
our mental environment. Because photographs
appear to be not so much “statements about
the world” but rather “pieces of it,” viewers
mistake them for reality (Sontag 1977: 4). In
this way, photographs generate the destructive
belief that it is possible to know and, moreover,
to possess the world through images. Sontag
writes, “The most grandiose result of the
photographic enterprise is to give us the sense
that we can hold the whole world in our
heads—as an anthology of images. To collect
photographs is to collect the world” (1977: 3).
Sontag maintains that photography
develops in “tandem” with modern tourism;
travel, she writes, is a “strategy for accumulating
photographs” (1977: 9). Throughout On
Photography, “tourist” or “supertourist”
provides a shorthand for the worst attributes
of photography. Tourists use cameras to shield
themselves from disorientation while claiming
ownership of foreign places. Traveling to many
places for brief periods of time, their experience
has a photographic quality—superficial,
gratifying, and incomplete. Substituting image
for actuality, photographs expand the tourist’s
sense of entitlement while impoverishing her
Photography & Culture  Volume 7  Issue 1  March 2014, pp. 7–20
understanding. Using the practice of tourism
to map the consumption of photographs
onto geographical space, Sontag associates
photography with a privileged mobility: both
tourism and photography assume that the world
is fundamentally transparent, and both enlarge
the possibilities for experience by shrinking the
distance between the consumer and her object.
On Photography theorizes the imperialist
habits of mind that Sontag exhibited, and then
cast off, in the first section of Trip to Hanoi. She
was, briefly, a restless visitor hungry for new
experiences but dissatisfied with those that
did not fit her preconceived notions, largely
generated by documentary imagery, of what
she would encounter abroad. This analysis,
however, cannot fully account for the breadth of
the critique that fuels On Photography, in which
so many kinds of seeing count as photographic.
In these essays, Sontag criticizes photographs
of all types, even those that one would expect
her to praise. She ridicules not only snapshots
taken by tourists on holiday, but also “surrealist”
images that aestheticize quotidian objects. Sontag
repeatedly describes the photographer as the
ultimate surrealist, who collects and attempts
to beautify “what other people found ugly or
without interest and relevance—bric-a-brac,
naive or pop objects, urban debris” (1977: 79).
While she admired the rehabilitation of defunct
objects in the context of happenings and North
Vietnamese resistance, in On Photography Sontag
complains that such photographs damage our
sense of reality by treating the identity of things
as inherently malleable. “Photography does
not simply reproduce the real,” she writes, “it
recycles it … In the form of photographic
images, things and events are put to new
uses, assigned new meanings … We make
of photography a means by which, precisely,
anything can be said, any purpose served” (Sontag
1977: 174–75). In its sweeping antagonism, On
Photography rejects both a consumerist mode
of viewing the world, which gives free rein
 16  Against Photography: Susan Sontag’s Vietnam Franny Nudelman
to an appetite for the new and exotic, and a
surrealist mode devoted to rehabilitating the
homely waste that consumers leave behind.
Susie Linfield holds Sontag largely responsible
for “establishing a tone of suspicion and distrust
in photography criticism,” which paved the way
for the “sour, arrogant disdain” of later critics
(2010: xiv–xv). Indeed, revisiting On Photography
it is hard not to be struck by the intensity and
breadth of Sontag’s critique. These essays
identify photographs of many kinds with the
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myriad ills of mass consumption. By the volume’s
end, Sontag’s analysis reaches a fever pitch.
“We consume images at an ever faster rate,”
she writes, and “images consume reality” (1977:
179). Linfield is right about the negativity of On
Photography, and may be right as well about
its chilling effect on subsequent discussions of
photography. I would suggest, however, that this
negativity is so in excess of its object, and so
contrary to Sontag’s own feeling for photographs,
that it should not be too readily absorbed into
a genealogy of photography criticism. Sontag
did not dislike photographs; to the contrary, she
adored photographs, and described herself as
a “photograph junkie” (Poague 1995: 54). No
photographs appear in On Photography, and this
absence seems appropriate not only because
the book vilifies photographs but also because
no photograph, or collection of photographs,
could bear the weight of its critique. One
cannot help but wonder to what extent On
Photography is really about photographs at all.
In a post-publication interview, Sontag
admitted that “photography” was “only a
pretext,” and that in the book she wanted
to “talk about something entirely different”
(Poague 1995: 90). This admission is born
out by Sontag’s 1970 essay on Cuban political
posters, which anticipates her later argument
about photography in surprising detail. In this
essay, which introduces an anthology of Cuban
posters, Sontag argues that collecting posters
is a form of “modern tourism.” She explains,
Photography & Culture  Volume 7  Issue 1  March 2014, pp. 7–20
Modern tourism may be described as a
means for a kind of symbolic appropriation
of other cultures which … turns traveling
into something more like buying. The
traveler accumulates countries visited
as he accumulates consumer goods
… Collecting posters is a species of
emotional and moral tourism … a way of
anthologizing the world. (Sontag 1970: xxii)
Tourism, motivated by the urge to accumulate,
provides the link between Sontag’s critique
of posters and her later denunciation of
photographs. The terms used to criticize
each genre are strikingly similar, and suggest
that Sontag was troubled not so much by
photographs, or posters, but by tourism itself.
Observing that photography was “only a
pretext,” Sontag went on to explain that in On
Photography what she really wanted to address
were “problems of our modern society,” and,
specifically, “complicated differences between
our thought and a superficial ability to perceive
… [between] the sequence of experience and
the capacity to judge this experience” (Poague
1995: 90). Like Trip to Hanoi, On Photography
dwells on the relationship between direct
experience and critical reflection. But if Sontag’s
autobiographical narrative demonstrates that
the two are compatible in the context of
activist travel, her essays on photography regard
experiential immediacy as the enemy of critical
thought. It is striking, for example, that despite
Sontag’s familiarity with documentary coverage
of the conflict and her antiwar activism, she pays
scant attention to photographs of the war in
Vietnam.12 Intent on repudiating “superficial”
perceptions, On Photography holds even recent
history at bay, and the relative absence of
Vietnam images contributes to the sense of
abstraction that characterizes Sontag’s polemic.
On Photography describes a dystopia in which the
pace of consumption continues to accelerate,
and our capacity to understand steadily frays;
 Franny Nudelman Against Photography: Susan Sontag’s Vietnam  17
this vision is embodied by an analytical style
that elevates critical reflection in the absence
of a grounding archive, epoch, or locale.
While the critique of consumerism Sontag
develops during the war is writ large in her
postwar diatribe against photography, the
utopian pragmatism that generated her critique
is nowhere to be found. During the Vietnam
era, activists of many types named consumption
as the source of U.S. militarism, and tried
to resist war by staunching the appetite for
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things at its source: consciousness. Like other
activists, Sontag hoped that her atrophied
perceptions might be revitalized, forming the
basis for a new self and a regenerated society.
In Trip to Hanoi, she cultivated an analytical
style that refused identification, which closes
the space between subject and object, in
favor of introspection, which enlarges it. She
cultivated such distance, however, in order to
convert it, at least briefly, into revelatory direct
experience. In Trip to Hanoi, self-reflection,
facilitated by travel, generates an affirmative
experience of common cause and belonging.
As the war came to a close, however, the
purposeful marriage of analysis, self-reform,
and cross-cultural solidarity no longer seemed
viable. In a brief reflection on the war, published
in 1975, Sontag explained that Vietnam had
“awakened” activists and intellectuals to the
“recklessness, cynicism, and ingenuity of power,”
impressing on them “how long and difficult a
task it is to effect real political change” (1975:
24). The totalizing nature of Sontag’s analysis
of photography reflects the despair that she
and other antiwar activists felt when they
observed that the military industrial complex
continued to flourish in the wake of military
defeat. In keeping with this view, she describes
a world in which domination proceeds by
way of diffuse and subtle mechanisms—
snapping a photo, or boarding a plane—and
aggression, “implicit in every use of the
camera,” cannot be checked (Sontag 1977: 7).
Photography & Culture  Volume 7  Issue 1  March 2014, pp. 7–20
Conclusion
In 2003, with the publication of Regarding the
Pain of Others, Sontag reconsidered many of
the positions she voiced in her earlier book
on photography. Regarding dwells not on the
dynamics of appropriation but, in the spirit of
Trip to Hanoi, on the discipline of responsiveness.
It does so, however, not by holding “here” and
“there” apart, but by exploring the various
ways that they are bound to one another. In
Regarding, Sontag urges her readers to: “Set
aside the sympathy we extend to others beset
by war and murderous politics for a reflection
on how our privileges are located on the same
map as their suffering, and may—in ways we
might prefer not to imagine—be linked to
their suffering” (2003: 103). Blurring distinctions
between “here” and “there,” viewer and subject,
suffering and privilege, Regarding not only insists
on the viewer’s complicity in distant suffering
but also on the shared vulnerability of subject,
photographer, and viewer.13 Reflecting an
emphasis on the global nature of catastrophe
that characterizes contemporary discussions
of terror, climate change, and epidemic disease,
Regarding asserts that even the most privileged
viewer is not—in the long run—immune to
violence that takes place at a distance.
This approach is tempered, I believe, by
Sontag’s trips to Sarajevo in the early 1990s.
In Sarajevo, Sontag experienced herself not as
an outsider who needed to guard against the
temptations of identification, but rather as a
member of a community under siege. In her
essay, “ ‘There’ and ‘Here,’ ” Sontag describes
the difficulty of returning to New York after
spending time in Sarajevo. She explains that
it is hard to “understand that you can never
really explain to them—neither how terrible
it is ‘there’ nor how bad you feel being back,
‘here.’ That the world will be forever divided
into ‘there’ and ‘here’ ” (Sontag 2001: 324).
During the war in Vietnam, Sontag struggled to
find a way to maintain the distance between
 18  Against Photography: Susan Sontag’s Vietnam Franny Nudelman
“here” and “there”; she traveled to Hanoi
in an effort to intensify the experience of
difference and to learn from it. In response
to the war in Bosnia, however, Sontag argues
for U.S. military intervention, and, accordingly,
she objects not to an easy sympathy but
rather to American ignorance and apathy.
Activist travel was an experimental practice
that allowed Sontag to develop and to
reconsider her ideas about photography and,
more broadly, the relationship between direct
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experience and critical reflection. Essential to
shaping these ideas, travel was also a mode
of political expression that surpassed them. In
Regarding, the distinction that emerges as all-
important is not the difference between those
who have suffered in war and those who have
not, or between those who view photographs
and those who are their subjects, but between
those who have traveled to a war zone and
those who have stayed at home. Sontag
concludes Regarding by asserting that most of
us cannot understand the way that exposure
to war makes war seem normal. By contrast,
this is “what every soldier, and every journalist
and aid worker and independent observer
who has put in time under fire … stubbornly
feels. And they are right” (2003: 126). Sontag’s
meditation on how to cultivate responsiveness
across distance concludes by affirming the value
of travel as a means to firsthand experience.
While her attitudes about photography shift and
change over the years, her reliance on travel as
a form of effective action and a means to ethical
knowledge remains surprisingly constant. If you
care about people suffering in war zones, she
suggests, go there. With, or without, a camera.
Acknowledgments
My gratitude to Jill Carrick, Karen Jacobs, and
Laura Wexler, who have taught me to think
about seeing, nourished my interest in Susan
Sontag, and helped me to complete this essay.
Photography & Culture  Volume 7  Issue 1  March 2014, pp. 7–20
Notes
1 On the relationship between Sontag’s antiwar
activism and her trip to Hanoi see Sayres 1990:
55–56, 131–33; Poague 1995: 15–18; Rollyson
and Paddock 2000: 122–29; Ching 2009: 56–61.
2 I am indebted to Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and
the Environmentalism of the Poor for the term
“writer-activist,” which I prefer to Sontag’s “literary
activist” as a way to describe writers who regard
themselves as participants in social movements
and write to effect instrumental change.
3 For example, Judith Butler argues that toward the
end of her life Sontag felt increasingly frustrated
by photographs because they provoked “outrage”
while “failing to show her how to transform that
affect into effective political action” (2010: 99).
Whether or not they like Sontag’s writing on
photography, contemporary scholars take her
analysis as the point of departure for their own
efforts to recuperate the political agency of both
photographers and their subjects. See Azoulay 2008;
Butler 2010; Linfield 2010; Abel 2012: 105–13.
4 While I focus on Sontag’s affirmation of travel
as an effective form of political expression, she
could also be extremely critical of what she called
“delegation travel” (2001: 282). See, for example,
her scathing account of political travel in her
essay “Questions of Travel” (2001: 281–84).
5 My account of the Peace Tower is drawn
from Schwartz 1971: 6, and Frascina 1999.
6 The tower’s impermanence was vital to its social
meaning. When the landlord refused to renew
the Artists’ Protest Committee’s lease, and various
plans for relocation failed, the frame of the tower
was cut up into small pieces and given to those
who attended the dismantling. The panels were
sold anonymously in a fundraiser organized by
a local peace center (Frascina 1999: 17–18).
7 Sarah Parsons also observes that by the time Sontag
published On Photography she had reconsidered
her earlier commitment to “an erotics of art”
(Sontag 1966a: 14). While I maintain that the
war in Vietnam soured Sontag’s enthusiasm for
unmediated aesthetic encounters, Parsons argues
that Sontag’s commitment to aesthetic pleasure
evolves as she comes to regard the embodied feeling
 Franny Nudelman Against Photography: Susan Sontag’s Vietnam  19
aroused by photographs as a type of eroticism
with “moral implications” (Parsons 2009: 290).
8 On activist travel to Vietnam, and writing about
the trip, see Rabinowitz 1994; Hershberger 1998;
Nudelman 2009; Nudelman 2013; Wu 2013.
9 In a 1975 interview, Sontag describes the “dialectical
exchange between simplicity and complexity,”
observing that “Every situation is extremely
complicated, and ... anything one thinks about
thereby becomes more complicated” (Poague 1995:
56). At the same time, “One cannot live out all
the complexities one perceives ... to be able to act
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intelligently, decently, efficiently, and compassionately
demands a great deal of simplification. So there
are times when one has to forget—repress,
transcend—a complex perception that one
has” (Poague 1995: 56). In Trip to Hanoi, Sontag
dramatizes this dialectic, exploring her complex
perceptions, and then opting to set them aside.
Franny Nudelman is an Associate Professor in
the English Department and the Institute for
the Comparative Study of Literature, Art, and
Culture at Carleton University. She is the author
of John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the
Culture of War (University of North Carolina
Press, 2004), and is currently writing a book about
activist documentary of the Vietnam era. Her
essay on Mary McCarthy’s Vietnam journalism
was recently published in American Literature.
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